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GPL in Court - Good or Bad?

Posted by Cliff on from the this-was-inevitable dept.

Irvu asks: "The Register has a lengthy opinion piece today about IBM's lawsuit, and the GPL. Barring a settlement this case will see the first test of the GPL in a court of law. Previously the GPL has functioned as a social contract with the implicit (albeit untested) force of law behind it. Any ruling now could radically alter the free-software/open-source landscape for good or ill. Andrew Orlowski dwells on these possible ills in his piece. What does Slashdot think? Is this test a good or bad thing? Do you have faith in the justice system (or IBM's Lawyers) to draw the right conclusions? And, how do you see any outcome affecting you?"

4 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. OJ by ttyp0 · · Score: 2, Redundant
    Any faith I had in the legal system was lost on the O.J. Trial. I'm placing my bets on who's pockets are deeper (IBM). Remember, the law isn't about what's right or wrong.

    Anti SCO T-Shirt. $1 donated to OSI Fund on each shirt.

  2. A good thing by Salo2112 · · Score: 1, Redundant

    This may be the vetting linux needs to have complete acceptence.

  3. The limitation of the GPL by mark-t · · Score: 0, Redundant
    The GPL does not and cannot apply to any derivative work that does not itself contain any code that was GPL'd. Because the GPL gets its strength from copyright, it cannot control what another author does with their own material when no GPL'd content exists in their product, even if it was somehow "derived" from a GPL'd work.

    If that were not true, you may as well be talking about copyrighting actual ideas or concepts, which SCO may think it has a claim to, but certainly doesn't have any validity in our copyright system.

    Interestingly enough, this also means that "GPL tainting" is entirely a myth. You can learn as much stuff as you want from a GPL'd program, but it doesn't mean you can't apply that knowledge to be used in another closed-source program that you yourself write later. Mild cosmetic similarities between the source code of a closed-source program and a GPL'd work could be reasonably considered a result of the limitation that there are often only so many known reasonable ways to implement given algorithms.

    As long as the GPL's concept of "derivative work" only extends to works that still contain some amount of GPL'd code, I would believe and hope that the GPL itself will fare well in court.

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  4. Re:The GPL doesn't mean as much as people think by gbjbaanb · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "you can't do these things because we said so" - doesn't the GPL say that I must make any derivative work GPL (or at least 'freely distributable'). How come that restriction on what I could legally do with my code is ignored in discussions about the GPL?

    The GPL is flawed - if you want code to be free, you should release it under a licence that says 'this is free. do what you want with it', and leave whoever uses it to make their choices with their code. Nice, simple, easy. Adds to the world of free software without making any restrictions whatsoever.